Does anybody remember that Facebook thing?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Ironically on the day it’s announced that Facebook has never been more popular, I appeared to have stopped using it. I say “appeared” because it took me a long time to realise I’d given up on it, which is my friends fault, because they didn’t realise they’d abandoned it either.

I expected more. Not the sounding of trumpets and a rain of angel feathers necessarily, but very definitely a last straw. I really wanted a last straw. I wanted Facebook to introduce a Beacon mk.2 system that rummaged through my personal details, worked out my bank details and advertised them on an RSS feed, allowing some unwashed malcontent to nick the last and only tenner from my account. Or, a virus wave to sweep over the entire thing so that every game of Scrabulous became akin to dancing barefoot with Typhoid Mary in a gutter filled with used syringes. I wanted to storm away from its charms in a huff.

I wanted it to do… something. But it hasn’t, it’s just continued. And gradually myself and my friends have simply drifted away from it. A peaceable parting of the ways. It’s not that I don’t particularly like it, for a while there it was pretty much our entire social calendar. Every party was arranged, discussed and dissected on the walls. If somebody was telling me a story, it was common for them to give up halfway through with the line: “just go and look on Facebook, I’ve stuck all the pictures on there.”

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